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Zothecula writes "With the aim of providing some physical interaction between entertainment robots and guests at its theme parks, while still maintaining a safe distance between the two, Disney Research has created an animatronic robot that can play catch and juggle balls with a human partner. Caught balls are thrown back 2.5 meters (8 ft) to the thrower, while the developers have given the robot several different animations that play out when it drops a ball. These include a shaking of the head, looking behind, looking down, or a shrug of the shoulders."

Yes, yes. Disney wants to reduce the cost of having real friends. They always wanted to keep kids indoors, so that they watch more of their content from the age of 0. In reality Disney is harming the children, who develop attention disorders from their colorful cartoons, if they are exposed to them before the age of 6 or so. And now they want to replace real human friends with robots too. Keep your kids away from TV and Disney robots, if you want less drama at home. That is what the good type of parenting m

It's all part of Disney's plan to take over the world. Step 1 was buying LucasFilm for their secret Real Lightsaber division. Step 2 is highly flexible robots. Step 3 is create their own army of Sith Robots. Please just submit because if that doesn't work, they unleash the army of Robotic Jar-Jar Binks'!

According the the video, they're using a Kinect for 3D tracking of the ball. That's pretty good resolution to result in high enough mechanical precision to make a catch. Also would reduce the cost of this project by a small fortune.

However, the article differs from the video. The article says "A Kalman filter algorithm is used to analyze video captured on an external camera system consisting of a Kinect-like ASUS Xtion PRO LIVE to track a colored ball in three-dimensional space and predict its destination and timing."

While the video specifically says "An off the shelf Microsoft Kinect with color and depth cameras is used to obtain the 3D position of colored balls."

So far, human brains have been superior for their ability to anticipate and catch a ball in flight, a lot of math is involved. A lot. Looks like that gap between robots and humans is getting smaller. I'm not 'too' worried, yet.